Red Hat has announced a new cloud management certification for Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack platform, within commerical ecosystem of the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network. The certification offers businesses assurance that their OpenStack-based cloud data and management offerings are test-worthy and have been approved by Red Hat and participating countries, the company said. Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, of virtualization and OpenStack for Red Hat said that OpenStack is becoming a core element of the enterprise cloud strategy for many customers. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform is architected and backed by the broadest partner ecosystem to be the preferred platform,” said Balakrishnan. “The growth and maturity of the ecosystem reflects the evolution of the product moving from addressing infrastructure-centric alignment to help with early deployments to now be well-managed, to be part of enterprise hybrid cloud implementations.” Since their start in April 2013 RedHat’s partner ecosystem has diversified, packing on a number of companies varying from infrastructure vendors to systems integrators. Chris Keene, president of BMC Cloud, one the associated Red Hat OpenStack adopting companies, said that the priority lies in ensuring that customers have both choice of underlying cloud infrastructure and the security of IT processes in the cloud. “As enterprises expand their production use of cloud computing, they are increasingly challenged by managing hybrid cloud complexity and ensuring operational and regulatory compliance,” said Keene. “We are happy to collaborate with Red Hat on their Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform to ensure that BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management continues to deliver the platform neutrality and cloud compliance needed for successful enterprise hybrid cloud management.”